Tuesday, February 19, 2019

A Conversation with Mike Martin, Author of 'Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series' @mike54martin

February 19, 2019 0 Comments



Tessier didn’t speak long but he spoke of the history surrounding the fishery in this part of the world and how many times they had been told it was a thing of the past, only to see it reclaim its place as part of the town’s on-going economy. “Ya can knock us down, b’ys, but ya can’t keep us down.” With Tessier’s speech the protest was over, and while the smaller boats found a place to tie up along the wharfside, the long liners and larger vessels left port to return home. Windflower thought it was a sad moment, but at the same time he felt the pride the people of Grand Bank had in their little community.”


Mike Martin was born in Newfoundland on the East Coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand. He is the author of Change the Things You Can: Dealing with Difficult People and has written a number of short stories that have published in various publications including Canadian Stories and Downhome magazine.

The Walker on the Cape was his first full fiction book and the premiere of the Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series. Other books in the series include The Body on the T, Beneath the Surface, A Twist of Fortune and A Long Ways from Home, which was shortlisted for the Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award as the best light mystery of the year. A Tangled Web was released in 2017 and the newest book in the series is Darkest Before the Dawn.

Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series

Series Description:

The Sgt. Windflower Mysteries are a light mystery series set in Newfoundland on the east coast of Canada. These cozy-like books follow the adventures of Sgt. Winston Windflower, a Cree from Northern Alberta as he finds a new life and new loves in the tiny village of Grand Bank. There are crimes and mysteries for the Canadian Mountie to investigate and solve but the Sgt. Windflower Mysteries are more about family, friends, good food and good times.

The recurring cast of characters include the love of his life, Sheila Hillier who keeps him well-fed and grounded in reality. There’s also his fellow Mounties like Corporal Eddie Tizzard and a long list of bad actors, both local and just visiting, to cause havoc in their sleepy little town. Windflower brings his native background and traditions with him and finds ways to use them to help himself and his friends through difficult times. Rounding out his life are his collie, Lady, who often has adventures of her own and some new additions to his family that appear in the latest book, Darkest Before the Dawn.

Interview:

Welcome back, Mike!  So what have you been doing with yourself since our last interview?
Mike: I’ve been busy, writing a new Sgt. Windflower Mystery and a few other exciting writing projects. I’ve also been elected as the Chair of Crime Writers of Canada which is both new and exciting.
For those not familiar with the Sgt. Windflower mysteries, can you tell us a little about the main characters?
Mike: Sgt. Winston Windflower is a Mountie who is originally from northern Alberta who finds himself stationed in tiny Grand Bank. He finds the woman of his dreams, Sheila Hillier, who is the Mayor of Grand Bank, and a cadre of friends and co-workers that share his love of good food and good times. And then they have to deal with the crime and a few dead bodies along the way.
Did you know when shocking events would occur in any of your books, or did they sneak up on you?

Mike: I don’t know before the reader does. That’s why I was shocked when it was revealed that one of the main characters was going to be shot. I saw it coming, but felt powerless to stop it from coming.

Do you proofread and edit your work on your own or pay someone to do it for you?
Mike: I proofread and then I pay someone and then I pay someone again and then I proof it again. And there’s still mistakes. Arghhhhh
Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process? How did you come up with the ideas behind your book covers?
Mike: Most of my book covers are photos of locations in Newfoundland. I choose them because they invoke an image in me of the story that I hope connects with the readers. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but people will buy more books if there’s an intriguing cover.
Is this the end of the series or do you have more planned?
Mike: Somebody once said that the story only ends when the author dies, so I hope there’s more books in the series.  For my sake!! I am working on a new book which will be out in 2019. At least one more after that.
What did you want to become when you were a kid?
Mike: I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. Of course, I did no training or practice and I wasn’t good at sports. Maybe that’s why I became a writer. It was all in my imagination.
Is there anything you’d like to tell your readers and fans?
Mike: Thank you for your support and love. As long as you promise to keep reading, I will keep writing.


Monday, February 18, 2019

A Conversation with A.L. Bryant, Author of Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter @ALBryantHSW

February 18, 2019 0 Comments

“Glory sat up sharply. A full minute passed before she stopped gasping and coughing. She had made some progress in controlling the duration of her illusions. Standing, she dusted herself off and picked up her cellphone. From what she could tell, she was underground in a place that resembled a dungeon carved from the rock that the mansion had been built on. It was large and dark. There was no place for light to shine through, so even during the daytime, the room would still be pitch black.”

--From Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter by A.L. Bryant

A.L. Bryant was born and raised in St. Petersburg FL. She became interested in writing at an early age; an interest that depending on the circumstance brought punishment (detention for passing out the latest installment of her novella during class) and praise (being chosen for a youth writers conference at the Poynter Institute.)  A.L. Bryant gets her inspiration from both her mother and her Great Grandmother. Her mother recently published an inspirational children’s book under a pseudonym and her great grandmother is South Carolina’s first published African-American female author and playwright.

Until recently writing had simply been a pastime for A.L. Bryant who although she attended several writing courses, graduated with a B.A. in International Business. It was shortly after her second job as a Financial Office Manager at a Goodwill correctional facility that she realized she loved writing more than anything else. It would still be some years before she would convert the short story she wrote in college into a novel.

Besides writing, A.L. Bryant loves traveling the world. God has blessed her with the opportunity to visit a total of seven countries. She has studied abroad in Seoul and has traveled throughout Kenya; two locations she researched for her Blessed series. Her dream is to visit every country in the world.

Her latest book is the supernatural Christian thriller horror novel, Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter.


Book Description:

On New Year’s Eve 2021 the staff at St. Ann’s Hospital witness a medical miracle when a semi-conscious woman walks into the emergency room. The Jane Doe has been stabbed multiple times and as the staff struggle to keep the woman alive in the end all they can do is stand back and watch as their mysterious patient revives herself.

Glory wakes up in St. Ann’s Hospital gravely injured from an attack she cannot remember. However, her memory loss is no ordinary amnesia and she is no ordinary patient. Much to the shock of the hospital staff Glory heals at three times the rate of an average person. Soon the administration hears of her unique case and waste no time convincing the recovering Glory to be a part of an experiment to discover the origins of her power.

Once outside the comforting walls of the hospital it becomes apparent that healing is just a small portion of Glory’s capabilities. Abilities that to Glory’s distress are becoming increasingly unstable. Deciding that the hospital’s experiments are in vain, Glory embarks on her own Journey to discover the source of her power, unaware that she is a major pawn in a war between two secret organizations.

The two syndicates continue to clash in their fight for control and their battles result in several casualties. The crimes of their warfare surface and draw the attention of Dennis Wilson, a NYPD Detective known for solving his cases in the first forty-eight hours. Dennis follows the trail of bodies out of curiosity. But when his curiosity causes the deaths of his loved ones Detective Dennis becomes obsessed with the case.

In his overzealous attempts to find the murderer Dennis becomes the syndicates’ next target. Now the Detective must run for his life and the only person capable of saving him is the very person he suspects.

Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter is a hybrid of government espionage and supernatural Thriller. This novel is intended for audiences 18+ that seek an edgier outlook on Christian fiction. Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter is the first installment of the Blessed trilogy.

Interview:

Welcome, A.L.!  Your first installment of the Blessed series sounds exciting! Can you tell us how you came up with the idea?
               
A.L.: Thank you! I wanted to play around with the notion of a spiritual being (or someone more in tune with spirituality) living in a natural world. A world that only acknowledges the natural. What struggles would someone like that face? How would they cope? COULD they cope when, according to the world they live in, their very existence is a lie?
  
Can you tell us a little about the main characters in Blessed: The Prodigal Daughter?

A.L.: This is the first installment of a trilogy so it introduces a lot of Characters, but the main characters would have to be Glory and Detective Wilson. Glory is a Stoic character with a lot of layers beneath her deliberate nature. Her character starts out a bit dry. As the reader you get to see her slowly unravel as things happen to and around her that she doesn't fully understand.
Detective Wilson is a cynical NYPD cop that's very good at his job but by his own admittance his proficiency has more to do with his obsessive nature than anything else. He can be a little rough around the edges but he actually has a good heart.
  
They say all books of fiction have at least one pivotal point where the reader just can’t put the book down. What is one of the pivotal points in your book?

A.L.: Well If I am to be honest, I would love it if readers of Blessed would not want to put the book down from the beginning. But for me the pivotal moment is when Glory decides to go out on her own. This is when tensions are building in every story arch and there is a noticeable change in tone.
  
Do you proofread and edit your work on your own or pay someone to do it for you?

A.L.: Unless you are an editor yourself it is imperative that you hire someone. I've had three editors, and their catches and suggestions have been invaluable. It can get expensive, but typically it takes at least a year to write a full-on novel and usually more than that for your first novel, so... save your Pennies!

Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process?

A.L.: As much as I love the sentiment and the good advice of "Never judge a book by its cover," I am realistic and believe we as consumers do just that. Let's be honest in this day and age we're all very busy; the world moves at an accelerated pace. Because time is limited and more importantly choices are vast, people are looking for a quick way to determine if something is worth their time and money.
  
What did you want to become when you were a kid?

A.L.:
-A neurosurgeon - don't ask me why.
-A secretary – when I was younger I began reading my grandmother’s Harlequin Presents novels (which I still love to this day) dated in the 70s and the 80s and all the secretaries in those books got the dashing men.
-A business mogul - because someone told me they spend most of their lives travelling. For as long as I can remember my goal has been to visit every country in the world.

 Do your novels carry a message?

A.L.: Yes. I believe most stories do, intentionally or unintentionally. It's very hard to write something and completely withhold yourself from the story; and every person is made up of opinions, alternative points of view, and life lessons.  Some of that essence will make its way into your writing. I think it is more important to have that message, but allow every reader to take from your novel whatever speaks to them.

 Is there anything you’d like to tell your readers and fans?

A.L.: Writing is truly a labor of love. I will never feel as though Blessed is done or can't be improved in some small way. For those who have taken the time to share in this Journey with me, I hope I entertained you and I appreciate each and every one of you!

Monday, February 4, 2019

A Conversation with Historical Thriller Author Michael McMenamin

February 04, 2019 0 Comments

“Mattie frowned. It had been well over a year since last she had been in Germany. As a consequence, her reputation in Germany as ‘Hitler’s favorite foreign journalist’ was beginning to fade. The last thing she wanted to do was revive that by doing a story on the SA and the German Army, notwithstanding that she had many high-level contacts in Nazi Germany including Göring and the Nazi foreign press chief Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl as well as Hitler himself.”

--From The Liebold Protocol by Michael & Kathleen McMenamin

Michael McMenamin is the co-author with his son Patrick of the award winning 1930s era historical novels featuring Winston Churchill and his fictional Scottish goddaughter, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The first five novels in the series—The DeValera Deception, The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda, The Berghof Betrayal and The Silver Mosaic—received a total of 15 literary awards. He is currently at work with his daughter Kathleen McMenamin on the sixth Winston and Mattie historical adventure, The Liebold Protocol.

Michael is the author of the critically acclaimed Becoming Winston Churchill, The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor [Hardcover, Greenwood 2007; Paperback, Enigma 2009] and the co-author of Milking the Public, Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter [Nelson Hall, 1980]. He is an editorial board member of Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society and a contributing editor for the libertarian magazine Reason. His work also has appeared in The Churchills in Ireland, 1660-1965, Corrections and Controversies [Irish Academic Press, 2012] as well as two Reason anthologies, Free Minds & Free Markets, Twenty Five Years of Reason [Pacific Research Institute, 1993] and Choice, the Best of Reason [BenBella Books, 2004]. A full-time writer, he was formerly a first amendment and media defense lawyer and a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent. 

Kathleen, the other half of the father-daughter writing team, has been editing her father’s writing for [Sterling, 2017]. The two sisters are professional organizers, personality-type experts and the founders of PixiesDidIt, a home and life organization business. Kathleen is an honors graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The novella Appointment in Prague is her second joint writing project with her father. Their first was “Bringing Home the First Amendment”, a review in the August 1984 Reason magazine of Nat Hentoff’s The Day They Came to Arrest the Book.  While a teen-ager, she and her father would often take runs together, creating plots for adventure stories as they ran.

Organize Your Way: Simple Strategies for Every Personality
longer than she cares to remember. She is the co-author with her sister Kelly of the critically acclaimed

Book Description:

Winston Churchill’s Scottish goddaughter, Mattie McGary, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist, reluctantly returns to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1934 and once again finds herself in deadly peril in a gangster state where widespread kidnappings and ransoms are sanctioned by the new government.

Mattie turns down an early request by her boss Hearst to go to Germany to report on how Hitler will deal with the SA Brown Shirts of Ernst Rohm who want a true socialist ‘second revolution’ to follow Hitler’s stunning first revolution in 1933. Having been away from Germany for over a year, her reputation as “Hitler’s favorite foreign journalist” is fading and she wants to keep it that way.

Instead, at Churchill’s suggestion, she persuades Hearst to let her investigate one of the best-kept secrets of the Great War—that in 1915, facilitated by a sinister German-American working for Henry Ford, British and Imperial German officials essentially committed treason by agreeing Britain would sell raw rubber to Germany in exchange for it selling precision optical equipment to Britain.  Why? To keep the war going and the profits flowing.  After Mattie interviews Ford’s German-American go-between, however, agents of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch are sent by Churchill’s political opponents in the British government to rough her up and warn her she will be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act unless she backs off the story.

Left no choice, Mattie sets out for Germany to investigate the story from the German side and interview the German nobleman who negotiated the optics for rubber deal. There, Mattie lands right in the middle of what Hearst originally wanted her to investigate—Adolf Hitler believes one revolution is enough—and she learns that Hitler has ordered the SS to assassinate all the senior leadership of Ernst Rohm’s SA Brown Shirts as well as other political enemies on Saturday 30 June, an event soon known to History as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’.

Mattie must flee Germany to save her life. Not only does the German-American working for Henry Ford want her story on the optics for rubber treason killed, he wants her dead along with it. Worse, Mattie’s nemesis, the ‘Blond Beast’ of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, is in charge of Hitler’s purge and he’s secretly put her name on his list…

Interview:

Welcome, Michael!  Your new historical thriller sounds thrilling! Can you tell us how you came up with the idea?
               
Michael: There are two main ideas in The Liebold Protocol and I explain the basis for each, as we do in all the books in this series, with a Historical Note at the end.

First is Mattie’s “Trading with the Enemy in the Great War” story that she is investigating for Hearst.  Germany and Great Britain really did trade British raw rubber for German optical equipment. I found this in Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars. And British companies did sell enormous quantities of materials to Imperial Germany throughout the war through Scandinavian 3rd parties as covered in Admiral Consett’s book The Triumph of Unarmed Forces 1914-1918.

Second is about the SA and SS throwing German citizens into concentration camps and then ransoming them to wealthy relatives who had emigrated to the Western Hemisphere. It’s a bit more fanciful, but it’s believable because I think the Nazis would have done it if only they had thought of it.

The idea came originally from Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Most people are unaware that IBM was in bed with the Nazis throughout the 1930s. The fact is IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany including the identification of Jews, Social Democrats and Communists in censuses, registrations and ancestral tracing programs. Creating a “protocol” to cross-reference the identities of German citizens with wealthy relatives abroad would have been fairly easy.

Incidentally, Black’s books provided the impetus for two of our other novels. His War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race inspired The Gemini Agenda just as The Transfer Agreement, The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine inspired The Silver Mosaic]

Can you tell us a little about the main characters?

Michael: As in the other novels in the series, there are three of them.

Mattie McGary is an adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist and Winston Churchill’s goddaughter who, to her dismay has become Hitler’s favorite foreign journalist.

Bourke Cockran, Jr. is Mattie’s husband [they were finally married in our last novel, The Silver Mosaic], a lawyer, writer, former counterintelligence agent and the fictional son of the young Churchill’s real-life mentor, the Irish American statesman and orator Bourke Cockran.

Kurt von Sturm is a Zeppelin airship commander and longtime Nazi Party member who is held in high regard both by Hitler and his #2 Hermann Goring whom he serves as an adviser on airships.  Sturm started out in the first two novels in the series as something of a bad guy. The two top Nazis are unaware that in our third novel, The Gemini Agenda, Churchill recruited Sturm into his European network of confidential informants.

If you could become one of the characters in your book for a day, who would that be and why?

Michael: An Actual historical character? We use a lot of them because it’s easier than creating a fictional character and lends verisimilitude to our books. So, the answer to that is Winston Churchill. Why? Well, I’ve written a dual biography of him and Bourke Cockran [Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor] and, for the past 20 years, I’ve been writing a season-by-season, year-by-year, serial biography of Churchill 125-100-75 years ago for the quarterly journal of The International Churchill Society, Finest Hour.

So, I think I know him pretty well, but if I were him for a day, I’d like to see if I could find out something new about him that I previously didn’t know. For example, I’m reading Andrew Roberts new biography of Churchill and learned something new today. In 1912, I knew the 37-year-old Churchill began taking flying lessons over his wife’s strong objections as they had two children under five years old and he walked away from more than one crash landing. What I didn’t know was that at the same time, he also began taking dancing lessons. Somehow I don’t think that placated his wife. If I were him for a day, I’d know.

A Fictional character? That’s probably what you were really asking. Well the answer isn’t Cockran. Too autobiographical as many author’s protagonists are [lawyer-check; writer-check; former counterintelligence agent-check]. Been there; done that. So the answer is Kurt von Sturm. Why? I would love to command a giant passenger Zeppelin airship. I was born in Akron, Ohio where the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation built all the Navy’s giant rigid airships in the 1930s, including the USS Los Angeles and the USS Akron and I’ve been fascinated by them all my life. Ten years ago, I even flew in a Zeppelin NT (new technology) which, unlike a blimp, has a rigid frame. Today, all the Goodyear airships you see at sporting events are Zeppelin NTs and built in Germany. They’re twice the size of a blimp, carry 12 passengers and two pilots with an on-board restroom. Airships appear in all of our novels in the series and will continue to do so until the Hindenburg crashes in 1937.

They say all books of fiction have at least one pivotal point where the reader just can’t put the book down. What is one of the pivotal points in your book?

Michael: Seriously? You’re asking for a spoiler? Isn’t that against the rules? I’ve got to check with my union steward on that.

OK, seriously. Here’s a secret. Most thriller writers, consciously or not, end up using as a template Joseph Campbell’s Twelve Stages of A Hero’s Journey. Hence there will be several pivotal points, typically beginning with Stage 8 where the hero hits rock-bottom and you wonder how is (s)he ever going to get out of that. If you don’t grab readers at Stage 8, they may not be there for Stages 9-12.

I outline a Hero’s Journey for all three of our major characters with a view to bringing their story lines together near the end of the book. The Liebold Protocol was designed from the outset to culminate in the Nazi’s “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934 where Adolf Hitler’s SS assassinate all Hitler’s enemies, both inside and out of the Nazi Party. At least 200, maybe more. So, one pivotal point [and not really a spoiler because you can read it in the Amazon publisher’s description] is when Mattie learns from a high-ranking SS official that the guy in charge of carrying out Hitler’s assassinations has put her name as well as Cockran’s and Sturm’s on his list of those to be killed on June 30.
  
Do you proofread and edit your work on your own or pay someone to do it for you?

Michael: It’s not either/or. Every writer proofreads and edits his own work continuously.
Do I pay someone? No. In addition to three good friends and my wife, I sort of  grew my own editor whom I don’t have to pay—my oldest child Katie who has an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She edited the final draft of all of the first five novels in the series and is now my co-author on The Liebold Protocol  and the novella Appointment in Prague that preceded it as well as our next novel The Prussian Memorandum.

Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process?

Michael: I think so in that I believe the cover should reflect what’s in the book and both of our publishers have done that.


What did you want to become when you were a kid?

Michael: A Navy fighter pilot, a dream sadly abandoned when I became near-sighted in junior high and had to have glasses.


Do your novels carry a message?

Michael: No and yes.

No, in that our purpose is similar to what Churchill said about his only novel which he wrote when a young man in 1897. It was a political thriller where the hero deposes the evil dictator of a mythical European country and, in the process, steals the heart of the dictator’s beautiful young wife. As Churchill wrote to his mother from India where he wrote the book:

“A wild and daring book tilting recklessly here and there and written with no purpose but to amuse.”

We hope our novels entertain and amuse.

Yes, in that our three main characters reflect our values. Their reactions are the same as ours to anti-Semitism [every book in the series], anti-Catholic bigotry, [The DeValera Deception and The Silver Mosaic], the 1922 Irish Civil War and the futility of the Great War [The DeValera Deception], Eugenics and forced sterilization [The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda and The Liebold Protocol], the evil of Reinhard Heydrich, the #2 man in the SS [The Berghof Betrayal, The Silver Mosaic and The Liebold Protocol] and the failure of FDR and Jewish Palestine to support the 1933 world-wide anti-Nazi boycott [The Silver Mosaic].


Is there anything you’d like to tell your readers and fans?

Michael: We really value and appreciate you very much. We wish there were more of you. If you know others who like history in the context of a good adventure story, tell them about Mattie and Winston’s adventures in the 1930s. They’ve won lots of literary awards so they can’t be that bad…

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